Eric Frank Russell

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eric Frank Russell (January 6, 1905 - February 28, 1978) was an English science fiction author, producing some of the best humorous science fiction of his time. He also used pseudonyms Duncan H. Munro and Webster Craig for short fiction he wrote.

Russell was a man who loathed the pomposity and rigmarole of humanity's various forms of organisation; he generally took aim at authority in all its forms. His is the humour of the pantomime clown, and yet a deeper and more serious thread, in which the spiritual aspects of humanity's endeavours and aspirations shine through, runs through his work.

He was born in Sandhurst, Surrey into a military family. He served with the RAF during World War II and worked briefly as an engineer before taking up writing full-time. He was an active supporter of post-war science fiction and also a member of the Fortean Society. He won a Hugo Award in 1955 for his short story "Allamagoosa", a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1985 for "The Great Explosion", and in 2000 was a posthumous inductee into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Russell's full-length works (some of which are collections of related stories) include:

Sinister Barrier (1939)
Dreadful Sanctuary (1948)
Sentinels from Space (also published as The Star Watchers, 1951)
Three to Conquer (also published as Call Him Dead, 1955)
Men, Martians and Machines (1955)
Wasp (1957)
Next of Kin (also published as The Space Willies, 1958)
The Great Explosion (1962)
With A Strange Device (1964); alternate title The Mindwarpers (1965)
Somewhere a Voice (1965, 7 stories)

Russell also wrote many short stories and novellas, as well as The Rabble Rousers, a sardonic nonfiction look at human folly, such as the Dreyfus affair and the Florida land boom. Many fondly remember his bureaucratic satire, Study in Still Life.

There are two omnibus collections of Russell's science fiction: Major Ingredients (short stories) and Entities (novels), available from NESFA Press.

Design for Great-Day (1995) by Alan Dean Foster and Eric Frank Russell is based on a 1955 story by Eric Frank Russell.

His Men, Martians and Machines can be considered the origin of the sub-genre depicting spaceships with a mixed human/non-human crew, which was to gain great popularity with Star Trek. Not quite by chance, the human members of the crew include a Black protagonist, at a time when this was far from common.

It is currently undecided, but Russell may be the originator of both the phrase, "May you live in interesting times," frequently attributed as an ancient Chinese curse, and of the abbreviation "MYOB" for "Mind your own business".

[edit] Available to read on-line

And then there were none, 1951. Anarchy in action - an excellent model of an anarchistic or free society in science-fiction form.
The Great Explosion, 1962.